Stocks had a steep pullback last Friday after the Trump administration and China appeared to be escalating a new round in the ongoing trade war (comments made over the weekend appear to have soothed tensions somewhat). The Fab Five pulled back $395 billion for the week but is still up $1.433 trilion in 2025. Meanwhile, the Telco Top Five continued their slide and is now negative as a group for 2025.
The big news in telecom was the abrupt replacement of Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg (news release here). The 60-year old former Ericsson executive is beng replaced by 67-year old Dan Schulman, a former AT&T/ Virgin Mobile/ American Express/ Paypal executive and Lead Independent Board member.
Dan is a long-time friend. While Jim was managing Wholesale for Sprint, Dan was his largest customer. He is a street fighter who will not settle for second place. He will have no issues with the Board. In short, Dan will right the ship.
Here are our top five questions:
- What type of CEO will Dan hire to replace Hans? Is it an internal candidate such as Sampath? If external, will it be a tech-oriented executive or functional (Verizon has long been run by Finance or Network individuals)?
- Where does Verizon need the most help today? Is it in the business division, consumer postpaid or prepaid? Prepaid appears to be in recovery, but business wireless net additions is clearly facing additional competitive pressures from T-Mobile.
- What role did Verizon prepaid play in the thwarted denial of service attack in September (Bloomberg article here)? Up to 100,000 SIM cards were involved. If Verizon SIMs were predominately used, where did controls fall short, and what is being done to ensure that it cannot be replicated?
- What can be stopped or at least stalled (FiOS video)? Product rationalization appears to have worked at AT&T – can Verizon do more?
- How will Verizon be as “in demand” as AI or other employers? What is the impact to Verizon of an aging (engineer) workforce?
Two telecom CEO transitions in one year means plenty of opportunities to speculate an opine. Stay tuned. File is below.
